25 years on, GIM continues to produce managers for the world of tomorrow

11 Aug 201804:44am IST

11 Aug 201804:44am IST

Goa Institute of Management is in its 25th year of operation. AJIT JOHN looks at how GIM has decided to move ahead and continue to create a niche that makes it unique in the country

As business evolves and gets even more complex it is important that one is trained to understand this world and more importantly be able to discern new trends. Business schools have been training young men and women to help them enter this pressure filled world. There are business schools all over the world and in India they are being established all over. In Goa too, a forward-thinking individual established an institution that is now ranked amongst the best in the country. The Goa Institute of Management (GIM) was originally started in 1993 by Fr Romuald D’Souza supported by a team of professionals and industrialists and has risen to one of the finest management schools in the country. It is now ranked among the top 10 private B-schools in India and among the top 20 business schools in the country

As it completes 25 years, it has certainly grown from a school which housed a six-member faculty and 24 students in a campus that was borrowed. The main course being taught was the PGDA program and expanded it to include healthcare. This tradition of expanding new areas of study is in keeping with the decision making and process automation and plans are now afoot to start a new program on financial insurance.

Ashoka Chandra, chairman, GIM is very conscious of the unique place occupied by the institution in Goan consciousness has maintained that it is important that the institution be aware of the changes taking place in the corporate world as well as around it.

Ashoka Chandra said “A traditional limited management program will no longer do. We all remember what had happened with engineering with many institutes opening up and the market saturating. We are preparing to continuously change the nature of the program but to also diversify into for example public management, public governance, issues like that we intend to take them up. We had decided from day one that research would be the way of life from day one, knowledge creation is necessary for knowledge dissemination. We want our faculty to keep researching and to keep themselves up to date and will to also transfer this into their classroom.”

The days of a narrow outlook are long gone he said they have to start programs in fields that would interface with management.

Prof Ajit Parulekar, director, GIM when asked how business education had changed in the 25 years said, “It was about business and then in the first decade of this century subprime crisis happened and a lot of people pointed fingers at business schools saying that something was wrong. Focus then came on ethics, values and corporate governance. Since we had someone like Fr Romuald D’souza, ethical education was very important to us.”

Today he said business schools in India had resources which were on par with the best in the world. This meant cost had increased. The cost of business education in the last ten years in India had increased fivefold. The challenge for any business school today is the pace of change that is taking place. The skill sets he said one learned at business school may hold good for perhaps five to ten years and it would then be important to reinvent oneself. The expectations from corporates are evolving but the most important one that is that the candidate hit the ground running.

Parulekar said “Gone are the days when you could take a management trainee, hold him for a year or year and a half and then he starts performing. Today the average time spent in a company is two to three years and so no one has the time. Corporates expect job ready managers to come in. Multi taskers are welcome and those who have the passion are prized.”

With the job market and technology changing so fast GIM’s role will be to make them ready for the world of tomorrow. This will mean including Internet of Things, blockchain, digital analytics etc in the pedagogy.

After careful study of the prevailing market for analytics education in the country consistent to GIM’s mission to nurture leaders for sustainable business, the B-school has decided to respond to the emerging paradigm of Big Data by incorporating it into its course structure and has introduced the Post Graduate Diploma in Big Data Analytics (PGDM-BDA) programme from this academic year 2018-19. The two-year full time residential course in Big Data Analytics is the only one of its kind in the country.

Parulekar, added, “The jobs of the future are jobs that have not yet been created. We took a hard look at what’s the future of management education and the future of employment in the industry. Today business is not conducted in the same way it was done 2 decades ago. There is no business today which is not in the business of analytics. New cutting-edge verticals is where GIM’s expansion plans will take place and the BDA space is one such vertical. Goa Institute of Management (GIM) in its 25th year of operation has decided to make its foray into this area with the Big Data Analytics (PGDM-BDA) programme.”

The business school of tomorrow will incorporate technology to provide quality education at a fraction of the cost because today the cost of business education is increasing dramatically and salaries are just not keeping up correspondingly to pay for these courses, student debt has increased dramatically.

Perhaps the final word should go to Fr Romuald D’Souza the gentleman who set it all up all those years ago. He said “I was simply asked why can’t we have a business school in Goa, and without funding or land we went ahead. Yes, we have a very powerful board which included the Chairmen of both P&G and HLL which made it unique and gentlemen like Anand Mahindra who helped us. It has been a journey but it is an ongoing one and the road ahead is exciting.”